[jen20]

The ZeroMQ Guide [1] (originally by Pieter Hintjens, now maintained by the community) is undoubtedly one of the best pieces of technical writing I've ever encountered - like another commenter posted, it's worth reading even if you will never use ZeroMQ.

[1]: http://zguide.zeromq.org

[AceJohnny2]

> originally by Pieter Hintjens

Some context (because it's been 3 years already!) :

Cancer diagnosis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520888

Legacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12650682

More: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Pieter+Hintjens

[setpatchaddress]

Wow, I disagree -- I find this incredibly difficult to wade through. It's full of marketing fluff and pointless tangents. I gave up after the first several pages.

[nycticorax]

I'm not sure I agree. It reminded me of certain "great" textbooks that sometimes get recommended by experts, that aren't actually that great for someone learning something for the first time. They get the reputation as being "great" because they are great for people that already have a good basic grasp of the material: They are precise and pithy, and they contain insights that are deep and useful, but hard to appreciate if this is your first encounter with the material. (Kleppner & Kolenkow would be a good example of a freshman physics textbook in this category.) It seems to me that maybe the ZeroMQ Guide is in this category. Which, of course, is a noble and important category, but maybe not the most important category if you're just starting out on a topic.

[dopplerac]

I'd like to disagree. The first time I read the guide was after my first programming internship during college and didn't really have a background in distributed computing or message queues. I only knew how to read and write code good enough for a CRUD based web app. I understood sockets though.

I found this book a great introduction to MQ and distributed computing in general. I didn't read cover to cover but I remember reading around 2/3rds of the book and didn't find it super hard to follow even though I did have to reread some sections. Also I must mention I was implementing a toy ZeroMQ project while I was reading the book.

[jen20]

That's fair - on the other hand if you already understand the principles of messaging (maybe from Hohpe, or some other introduction to pi calculus), it's a great piece of writing about an otherwise dry topic - a C library.

[j88439h84]

I love the way you expressed this.